The people present at the interview were: Ronnie Amsler, Inger Haut, Lars Haut, Paula Bandler, Richard BandlerRichard: So much of my work changed over the year. I discovered it wasn't good enough to teach people how to do good things. I had to teach them how to make good choices to start with, coz it all boils down in the end to making good things and so that the decisions that you make will be better in the future. The inverse is also true, if you feel bad so you start to make decisions ... People break up their marriage, they are depressed and so they go: ”Who am I gonna be with now?” And when they are propelled from a bad feeling they're gonna make bad decisions. So this makes it so important to feel good before you start deciding what to decide. Otherwise your decisions will not be good decisions. The more you make good decisions the better decisions you will make. The more you make bad decisions - and this is why people have cycles of ups and downs coz it takes very little to change that course around. This is why you have to be so careful that when things are really going bad that you really stop and put yourself into a good state before you re going to make decisions about what you're going to do about it. And people go: ”Well that is not very realistic!” And I go: ”Yeah, but it works!” They told me it is realistic to dredge around in people's childhood to try to figure out how to make them happy adults. To me it sounds absolutely absurd - the idea that because your parents didn't love you enough as a child ... You know I had a crappy childhood, but you know what? I just don't think about it much because I've had a wonderful life as an adult and I made sure it stayed that way. And people say: ”Well, if you repress this stuff it will come out somewhere else.” Well, it will. It will come out in their childhood! To me the Dalai Lama summed it up quite well: ”Sometimes bad things happen - you just don't dwell on them.” If you throw a pebble into a pond it makes ripples for a while but eventually it smoothes out. When people dwell on things too much they blow them out of proportion. This is one of those phrases.Psychologists said they observed people. They did this in a way where they didn't let their own personal feelings get involved. I am not like that. I am personally involved with everyone that I change their lives because they don‘t come to me first to start with. I am not anybody's first choice. By the time they get to me they‘ve been through everything, and pretty much they are told that this is their last hope. And I always look at them and smile and say: ”Well, then you're in big trouble! Because I am not gonna fix you. Coz‘ I don't think you're broken. I think you are just stupid. And one thing that's nice about accepting that you're stupid is that you can always get smarter.” I accept that I am stupid.Interruption from the waiterSo where were we? You were going to interview me.Ronnie: You mentioned that late at night you are working on a new book. What is your new book going to be about?Richard: Actually there is a couple that I've been working on. One is called "Back from the abyss”. That is primarily a book of fiction. As I say in the beginning there is not one shred of truth in it. So nobody has to be afraid of anything. It kind of oscillates between stories and stories about the stories. It's a book that is designed to dispell fear. It makes fun of absolutely everything - especially me! Because I believe that one of the problems is that people can't poke fun at things. And that's why things become much more serious than they ever ought to be. That the idea that there are laws of thermodynamic, the absolute pompousness of people who made those things up ... that's why I made up the three universal laws of human modeling! And people were asking: ”We are writing our termpaper and what do we reference?” And I said: ”Well, the structure of magic, that's where I laid them out.” And they said: Well, you didn't make them sound like they were laws?” I said: ”Well, other people make up laws, why can't I?” I make up my own laws. To me it's the silly things: I have been accused of such horrid things. But I never thought that they have done a terribly good job of it. So I accuse myself of everything: I blame myself for the black plague. I blame myself for everything that's ever gone wrong on this planet. See, to me it's not where you put blame. It's what you can get done that counts! All these people who have all that time end energy to pluck names of how they're trainers of NLP, head of the German society, head of the Swiss society. But if they have no connection with me they have nothing. Because it is the thread that runs from me to people that is about really the strongest thing that NLP is about. It's about an attitude. And the attitude says that things can get better and that things should be based on doing the right thing for the right reason. Not because people are inherently helpful but because doing helpful things is the right thing to do. You can't sit by and watch children starve. It's the wrong thing to do. And people have known this for centuries and there is only one thing you can do about it and that is to feed them. And start with the one which is the closest to you and work your way out. It's wrong for people to have such wonderful lifespans and no life. To me it's only as we conquer fear ... which is as we said in the workshop I was doing with you, two years ago. When you realize how easy it is to take the sensations that constitute fear which stop people from doing everything. It stops them from being intimate, it stops them from being kind, it stops them from doing the things in life that they wanna do. They are afraid of poverty and yet they never had it, they don't know what it is. They are afraid to try things, they are afraid to do things. They are so afraid they hide behind this pompous beenpusher attitude, where they think titles make up for skills. They think hours make up for enthusiasm. It is not how many hours you spend in a practitioner course. It is how enthusiastic the person who teaches it is. It is not how long it goes on. It is how much information is transferred from one person to another. It is how much skill the other one has.I know of things which are so absurd. I met someone on an airplane who pulled out my book and started reading it. I laughed and said: ”Are you enjoying that book?” The guy said: ”No, but it is very important!” And I said: ”What is it you're trying to get out of it? Because actually I've read that book. It was about thirty years ago and my memory is that there is not that much in it.” And he said: ”I've been in a course for nine months studying the Meta Model”Interruption from waiterRonnie: Lately I‘ve read some articles in NLP Magazines for instance discussions about the Neurological Level Model of Robert Dilts that are so pompous, they strike me like some medieval scholars arguing whether Jesus could have saved the world in the shape of a pea ...Richard sees an article in the magazine on the table: See that picture right there? That picture there belongs to me! That does not belong to whoever wrote the article. That picture there is mine and it is out of my book! Now, what's it doing in his article? He didn't ask me permission for that! It says right here: it‘s the NLP eye accessing cue for normally right handed people. No, it is not! It is Richard Bandler's eye accessing cue chart from Richard Bandler's book. Now that makes this man a plagiarist. NLP has never written anything. It's a word. It's not a human being, it does not own anything, it is just three letters out of the alphabet which I put together as the name of what I do. And I have been very generous about sharing it with people but there are a lot of people who have been much more generous with themselves about stealing it. And that person who published it is guilty of not checking his fax. And he should not publish things by people who are plagiarists. So the publisher of this magazine is just putting things in there to make money. He is not checking his fax like a good journalist should, because he knows what book that came from. But it didn’t quote it from my book. I didn’t see a footnote in there. But yet he publishes articles by people and he just doesn’t care. Because he’s in it for a buck. It’s a good marketing ploy, you know? But I think these people should go and sell aluminum siding and give up my work. Coz' my work is gonna hurt them and they don’t understand this. My work is dangerous, very dangerous, for those who do not use it properly. It does not hurt other people, it hurts the one using it if they don’t use it properly. They will end up being a bigger and a bigger idiot every day and it will become more apparent. They’ll end up taking on Hawaiian guru names and every other idiotic thing you can think of. And I always say: ”It doesn't matter, not even a tad.” (laughter) I got that from my wife.The most important thing is that people focus on what it is that my work is about: My work is about making humans rise above the dung of society - not to be better than other people, but to be better human beings, better than they were the day before, and better the next day than they were the day before that. Not bigger idiots, not bigger titles, not more credentials, not bigger plagiarists. Because I tell you I have never seen so many books written about such few ideas.A journalist from Germany said to me one time that she was at a workshop and they had a table full of books. There must have been 200 different NLP books out there and she said she bought everyone of them and she went and she read all these books and she said: ”All of the stuff that was in all of the books is in your book already. So what are these other books for?” And I said: ”Money! That’s what they are for. They‘re not about ideas. Even the book ”Influencing With Integrity” which I find absolutely ludicrous as a title, right? The introduction is written by somebody R.B., and it’s not me. It’s done totally to make it look like it’s me, but it’s not me. It’s written by somebody else who I guess has those initials but he doesn’t write out his name, it just says R.B. That’s put there to deceive people, that’s all it’s there for. It’s there to cheat and to trick people. So that when they pick up the book and they see it they’ll buy it and somebody makes some money. And everything that’s in the book isstolen, including the inside cover plates which were taken from my home. By someone literally stolen, not kind of stolen - literally stolen. There was a game board called ”Loosing Your Marbles” that I was making up at the time. This person stole it and put it inside their book. Now to me, I don't care what anyone says. The truth will be known and the truth will set everyone free in the end. The truth is: This guy who owns the journal and this guy who wrote the article did not make up this work, so I don’t really care if they wanna argue how big a pea is on the nose of Jesus. This does not matter to me one iota..Inger: You are moving so fast that a lot of your old students are falling behind.Richard: Oh, you mean that you have to keep learning things? I don't stop. I am not done yet. Some people try to avoid learning new things by being more and more stupid. They forgot what was the most important thing. Which is they didn't get into this so that they could be superior to someone. They didn’t get into this so that they could get stuck. They got into this because they tried something new and it gave them a real thrill. For the first time they had an impact that the clients changed in ways. But they forgot that in order to do this they went first. See, when they came they didn’t start by just learning something and going back and changing somebody else. That’s when the thrill happened. But what changed first - was them! You can't stay the same, you can't stay safe. There isn't anything safe anywhere on any planet that I know about. It's a very dangerous thing being alive, as soon as you're alive, you know. Life is the cause of death. Without life there would be no death and people forget that what it is all about is having courage to stand up for what you believe and being able to take the bodysensations that you have and make them so that your hopes, your desires, your dreams, the things you care about and the people that you work with, that all of that stuff is headed into the same direction. That it is headed into the future. So the other book that I am doing is I am putting together some CD's. They are like the tape series I made ten years ago. They were designed to make the human spirit to be able fly and in the past few years as you say most everything is changed. I don't do what I used to do. I don't have to. I found better, faster, quicker, more efficient ways. You know you could sit around for three hours doing reframing. I can't believe that they still teach it. They teach it in courses that I am teaching with them. They don't teach it when I am around, but I just think it takes too long and it's too idiotic. It was a good step. But at that time the reason we had to do it was because people thought hypnosis was bad and they thought it didn't exist. These things don't even fit together but yet this was the current belief. So we made up a goofy way that they didn't have to say the word hypnosis, but they did all the same things. Now that I don’t really think that‘s an issue anymore, I think any competent communicator who thinks hypnosis is bad or good is got to be wearing a dress and it has got to have a white collar on it at the same time. Because anybody else is not thinking about bad or good.They're thinking about what works and what doesn't work.Ronnie: What are areas you have been exploring recently? You mentioned modeling some dangerous stuff.Richard: Some things are more dangerous than others. Things are only dangerous depending on whose hands they're in and how they are used. Many things that were done by various ”cult leaders” ... Rasputin was a great hypnotist, he was a guy that did miracles and people thought he was a bad guy.Ronnie: My grandmother knew him.Richard: Your grandmother knew him? Oh, that’s wonderful.Ronnie: She met him when she was a companion to the daughter of the Zar. She spent some time with them in their holiday resort at the Black Sea. She said all women were dependent on him and bragged: ”Only I could resist him!” (Laughter)Richard: ”Mmhm, only I!”Ronnie: ”So I even have some small chance to be a bastard grandson of Rasputin.” (Big laughter)Richard: And what a chance that would be! My wife and I found a photograph of him the other day and we ..Paula Bandler: I want to morph it with Richard‘s picture.Richard: Bansputin, I can see it now.Ronnie: And he used hypnosis, too?Richard: Oh man, I guess. To me there are some fairly unknown things. That‘s part of the reasons that we went to India. It wasn't just because they wanted me to teach there. But there was lots of good ideas to explore. We went to some places where people came to us in droves and shook our hands for being the only white people they had ever seen there. And I got mad. I said: ”Look, I'm not white.” Excuse me, there are some things worth being proud of. Compared to them I might look white but I certainly don't look white when you put me around other people. I don't have the right ideology. I would never make a good nazi. I'm always too busy looking. There are too many things I wanna see. So when they say ”not see” (pronounced like nazi). I say: “No, not me. I will see!”Writing all this nonsense about ethnic cleansing. I think we should drop some mirrors down in that country so these people can take a good look at themselves. You know, that a big tough soldier could chase children out of their homes ... I mean, these people should just basically be ashamed of themselves and until they are we have a lot to teach on this planet. That people think that torturing children is a good idea, I mean excuse me! These people know better than this! But whenever you put groups of dogs or groups of ignorant people together it is no telling what they will do, you know. They run wild. You can take the most domesticated dogs in the world and you put them in packs and they run around and they kill things indiscriminately. And humans are much the same way and until humans learn to simply say: ”No, I won't do that, that's wrong. And you know it's wrong and I'm not gonna do it!” Until someone says it nobody will stand up and say it. And I'm sure these soldiers don't feel right about what they’re doing, they can't. There was one story somebody told on television about how one of the soldiers had helped them to escape, you know. He was supposed to take them out and take everything away from them. And he took them out and told them to get in their car and get the hell out of there. He said: ”My uncle is married to anAlbanian. I just can't do this, I don't feel right about what they are making me do.”There’s always gonna be people like that who stand up for what they believe. And those are the people in the end that should be proud of themselves and will always feel good about what they are doing in the end. Coz‘ he did the right thing for the right reason. And it’s not that hard. It’s not that hard to feel good once you know how your neurology works. I mean, if people can enjoy jumping out of airplanes they can enjoy just about anything, I think! The fact that they can jump out of a perfectly good airplane for fun, I mean to me is like ... and you know they can get in a boat and drag string through the water and hope fish will find it ... I mean we have the technology now where we can track the fish down and nuke em if we wanted to ... When I was a kid, when we were hungry we used to drive M-80 into the lake and let the fish come up to the top and gather them up and eat them. But we did that coz‘ we were hungry.Here there are places in the world where they are testing nuclear weapons in the water. If an M-80 kills a fish imagine what a nuclear bomb must do in an atoll! ... the absolute destruction of beautiful marine life to find out if it works. We already know it works, right? And we already know that it's gotta be bad.If there are any UFO‘s they gotta be looking at this world in utter disgust: Why is this planet attacking itself? Here we are bombing ourselves all over the place. It just absolutely got to look absurd. We are not attacking another planet, we are attacking ourselves! This is our airsupply, this is our food, soil, and we are just wracking havoc with it, in every way imaginable! And this is all based on the simple fact that people make bad decisions. And they make bad decisions when they feel bad. And it's that simple.When they are talking about ethnic cleansing then I doubt that they are trying to cleanse out what they think is bad I think they are trying to cleanse themselves. And the best way to feel good about themselves is to do it for no reason. And the more we make that kind of technology, I mean the kinds of things I concentrated on is: I don't think you can leave any part of the human spirit unturned. To me, people have to develop their ability to love, they have to develop their ability to think. And they have to do them all together, you can't just do one thing. You can't just become a great athlete and leave it at that. If you do that you are nothing than a piece of meat. If all you do is learn to become a great musician and you don't become a great person you won't have anything to sing about.So when you said: you're still doing arts and still doing music – of course. And this is what I don't see in other people's work that I encourage and install in everybody I work with, that they should be doing arts. They should be doing music, they should be writing, they should be doing all of these things.We should be making renaissance not waiting for it. Coz' it ain't gonna happen unless we do it and do it deliberately. And it‘s only through a great renaissance of the human spirit that we can begin to get everybody involved. Not a small group of people but everybody. We should be teaching our children about chemistry, music, art and literature not about stupid lies that aren't true that we know aren't true. In my country we're still teaching that George Washington didn't lie. Excuse me,the guy was a bold face liar. The fact that they have a statue of him in London shows you how absurd things is. He was the guy who ripped America away from England and they have a statue of him here as a great leader! But they put that up after we became allies. Because if it wasn't for what America did, I’m sure this would be a nice little province of Russia or Germany. Or we would all be dead. But at that time one of the most stunning things I ever saw was a picture of the US with German flags on one side and Japanese flags on the other. These people had incredible fantasies of world conquest, and I don't know about you, to me, I have enough trouble running my own life. The idea that these people are obsessed with running everybody else's is beyond me.People have to really learn to get your own house in order. And of course once you start to get it in order you start to see all the possiblities of what you can do with your time rather than think about what other people are doing. We have religious leaders in the US that are obsessed with pornography. And I wonder how much of their life is absorbed in thinking about it. Here one of the greatest documents to come out of the U.S. last year was a huge document to come out about the president of the United States which has more pornography in it than anything you have ever seen, put out by the biggest religious fanatic around, this Kenneth Starr. I loved it when Larry Flint came out and offered him a job at Hustler Magazine. He said: ”Never has anybody put so much pornography together so fast in one place.” I mean, to me people are so concerned about other people's lives. To me, this is symptomatic of the fact that people don't have good lives. When people have really good lives then they make their own life better and then it affects other people in a better way. And this is something that people in the field of NLP have got to learn right out of the gate. Otherwise they're gonna have me to deal with them - still a young man. They got a lot of years to fuck around with me. Boy, let me tell you.Ronnie: How many people more do you have to train until NLP makes a huge effect in the world?Richard: Well I think it's already made a huge effect. As far as I'm concerned I am flabbergasted. I go all over the world and people already know who I am when I get there. I think that's just lovely to tell you the truth. I went to India and I got a better reception in India than I get in my hometown. Not that I get a good reception there usually. I get a reception when I get home and they say: ”Your bills are unpaid and your dog shit on my lawn.”Ronnie: And you can go into every bookshop wherever and you find NLP books.Richard: Oh yeah, it's funny we were at the antique market the other day and my wife was getting a necklace with some beads from India and this woman said: ”Oh, have you ever been to India?” And I said yes and she said: ”Where did you go?” I told her and she said: ”That's a funny place to go to India! What were you doing there, that’s a computer town?” ”I was teaching hypnosis!” And she said: ”I have a friend who does hypnosis in something that's called Neuro Linguistic Programming” And my wife said: ”My husband made up Neuro Linguistic Programming”and the woman swung her eye around and looked at me and she went: ”Who are you?” We were in a restaurant the other day and somebody came up to the table and asked: ”Excuse me but are you Richard Bandler?” I said: ”I think so, why did you ask?” ”Oh, I saw a film about you.” But it's funny, to me, when I went to college and that wasn't really that long ago and in my freshman year I took philosophy 102 which is introduction to philosophy. And a couple of years ago I was sitting in a bar and the bartender was reading a book. And there wasn't anybody else in there so I walked over to the bartender getting a drink and the guy closed the book and it was philosophy, introduction to philosophy. And I said: ”Oh I took that course in college. What are you studying, Plato?” And he said: ”No, I am studying somebody named Bandler. Plato is the first quarter and now it's the last quarter.” And now in introductory philosophy courses people are studying me, you know it goes Korzybski, Bateson, Bandler. And actually in terms of things I mean Robert Anton Wilson's last book was dedicated to me and my wife. And I find that kind of stuff really to be an honor. Just to be mentioned by somebody like that I think is wonderful. But yeah, I go to the most obscure places on the planet. In Germany we were in Chiemsee.Ronnie: Yes, I was there, too.Richard: Yeah, you remember that little tiny town in the middle of nowhere – Prien. My daughter went in and dropped some film off and the guy looked at the name and said: ”Bandler - you know there is a very famous man by the name of Bandler. He writes books about something called Neuro Linguistic Programming.” And my daughter looked up and said: ”Yeah, that's my dad! And he went: ”Oh really?” ”Yeah, he is right over there”.So these people who did not speak a word of English, coz‘ my daughter speaks perfect German. And my daughter brought them that evening and they came in and they sat there for two hours, while I lectured on and on in English. And they just sat there nodding and smiling away and then I went up and my daughter introduced me to them and they rattled away in German. They didn‘t speak English but they didn't care. To me I find that a wonderful attitude.When you consider it was less than fifty years ago my relatives were run out of that country, I mean literally. And that the world has changed that much I find to be an amazing thing. Because they didn’t just run poor people out, they ran everybody out. It was ethnic cleansing at that time. And I am sure that people now ... fortunately the generations have changed enough that this is not the attitude of people in Germany. They are one country that knows the feeling of wanting something to never happen again. To me that anybody would want to imitate that is so bizarre and that they would be allowed to get away with it is just too bizarre.And to me it's just always been amazing that through the years I have not encountered any resistance in the field of psychology because people when you give them something they can use and they can do are delighted with it. The only problem I ever find is like you said with the people who have not come back over the years and have gotten way way behind.Coz‘ I don't move slow. Suddenly they have people come into their classes who know more than they do. And so they try and deal with it rather than going: ”Hey, I better go back learn something new.” Instead they try to deal with it by saying: ”No, that's wrong.”I can remember and this was fifteen years ago. There was a time where that group of people got together and tried to get me to agree to never call what I did NLP again. Because they wanted to keep NLP safe from me, because I was changing it in ways they did not understand. I of course laughed in their face.Inger: They begin to find out that what they are doing will not function in the society and that’s an interesting thing because it doesn‘t move. And they are stuck and only have the theory ...Richard: That’s right. ”My ideas are right although I am totally impotent in my behavior. I understand the theory of sexual intercourse and the fact that I cannot do it does not mean a thing.”We are constantly coming up with new things. Some of the new project is - and this is one of the reasons why I have recently dealt so much with fear. Because I discovered, that if at the beginning of a workshop I can really change things in a profound way, if I gave people in the very beginning the ability to turn fear around. Then the more things they were afraid of the more things they have to learn about - so it's almost like: The worse off you are the better you can get! And it's a funny thing. Coz' once I'll demonstrate how easy this is, I mean it's such a simple phenomenon, that if you take fear and you literally take the physical sensations, where they begin and how they move, and you literally turn it around so that you can do it in the opposite direction. For some people it‘s moving front to back or back to front. With some it moves from the right to the left and the left to the right but usually it spins and that is how it's able to stay. Coz' any feeling that continues for a long period of time has to have a way of sustaining itself. So it has to build a system of movement and primarily that happens to be rotation. So we take the centerpoint of the rotation flip it upside down and have it spin in the opposite direction. And it turns fear into a totally different sensation.And what will happen is: if people keep spinning it, even though they are thinking the same thoughts, they’re looking at the same objects, it doesn't matter what it is as long as they can spin it in the opposite direction. What happens is, it moves from a partbody sensation to a whole body sensation. And that's the point at which people can deal with it, coz‘ what happens is: it doesn't feel like fear, it feels like determination. And then people suddenly ... coz‘ fear gets you to not learn new things and as soon as it is gone you start paying attention, and then you begin to see new things, hear new things and do new things. So the result is: in the past couple of years the students that I have gotten are moving so much faster than anything I've ver had before. It is phenomenal! They are learning things so rapidly it is absolutely unbelievable.And of course some people are freightened because we do the practitioner course in seven days. Of course this scares the hell out of them, coz‘ they make their money by making taking it a long time. But you see, we haven't run out of things to teach. So we don't have to keep the same people around and bleed money from them. The other reason that scares them is we haven't made it very expensive coz‘ I believe NLP courses all got too costly. That the idea that a practitioner certificate costs 4000 to 6000 £ is absolutely crazy. It shouldn't costthat much money to get the skills. These are skills that are readily available, easily taught and should be shared with lots and lots of people. It's not like there is a lack of fear on this planet. It's not that there is a lack of stupidity on this planet and it's not like there is any shortage of crazies. But to me it's such a good marketing thing. It's such important stuff. You have to learn it real slow. Unfortunatey thiat‘s not what it is about: It's about learning fast! You should be able to learn it fast. But they don't do installation. You see, this is the problem. If as a teacher you do not install the right learning strategies people can not learn quickly. So therefore it takes them forever to explain it and for people to learn it by doing it over and over again.But they come out of these courses they come in and I say: ”What do you do if somebody says they're depressed?” and then they go: ”About what?” and that's not what you ask! If you start with the smallest chunk and try to get to the biggest chunk that's like building a pyramid by putting all the small things at the bottom and all the big blocks on the top. It's just fucking stupid and it won‘t work. Everything will fall down. You know you put the big pieces at the bottom and you build on top of it with the small pieces. When I get down to saying: ”about what?” I want to have good results coming out of it. I don't care what they are depressed about, it's all the same thing. And I don't care how they depress themselves, either. Coz‘ I don't want to depress anybody else. To me, I wanna know how they are aware that it is going on and I want to reverse the process.Part of what I was telling you when that taperecorder went sour was about this operasinger. And what a guy this was and what a memory I have! Here is a guy who has gone through all the trouble to learn a skill. He is very good at the skill. But when he starts to do it in front of other people he lacks confidence. So in his infinite wisdom after having two years of NLP-training - by the way he hadn't become a practitioner yet. This was a three year training program. The first nine months they spent on the metamodel. He sat down with me. He said: ”It took me a long time to make the decisison to hire you but no one else I felt could help me.” And I said: ”Well, are you pretty confident about that?” and he went: ”Oh yes!” And I said: ”Good! Are you sure you feel confident about that?” And he said: ”Oh, absolutely!” And I said: ”When you feel confident where does the feeling start?” And he said: ”I beg your pardon?” And I said: ”Look, you told me you felt confident. You weren't lying to me, were you?” And he said: ”No, I feel confident.” And I said: ”When you feel this confidence that I can help you, where does it start?” ”Well it's here in my stomach.” ”And where does it move?” ”Well,it moves up right. And it‘s as if it goes trough my throat.” And I said: ”How convenient!” And he looked at me and I smiled and I winked at him and he went: ”I know what you are gonna tell me to do!” ”What?” ”You're gonna tell me and have this feeling and sing.” ”Good guess!” He stood up and he sang and he looked at me and said: ”I feel so stupid for not having done this before.”And I said: ”Well, are you confident about that?” And he looked at me and went: ”Yeah!” And I said: ”Well good, maybe you should be confident about singing and uncertain about being stupid or else be sure enough to realize the only thing that makes you smart is this time you realized being stupid.” And he said: ”No no, I can't believe I spent ten thousand $ to learn something I already knew!” And I said: ”Well, there is the problem! The problem is not knowing what to do, the problem is knowing when to do it. And it's not that people don't have confidence, it's that they don't know how to put it in the right time and the right place. They are confident about things they shouldn't be. It's not that people shouldn't be afraid it's that they should be afraid of sleeping with their best friends wife. And the passion that they feel they should aim in the right direction.I think the smartest client I ever had was the one who told me after I've got rid of a phobia in five minutes .. He said to me: ”I feel 5000 $ in five minutes .... I said: ”If you want it to take five years I can drag it out for five years, no problem.You wait here for five years and I come back and do it in five minutes but that’s not gonna help anybody. How much time have you wasted on this so far? Look, I still have two hours before my plane leaves. Now, can you think of something else you would like?” And he said: ”Now what I would like is everytime I see my wife, everytime I talk to her on the phone I'd like to be more in love” And I went: ”Oooh, that sounds good!”And about six months later I was teaching a seminar and everybody in it was laughing and that woman in the seminar was scauling at me. And the first break she walked up to me and started poking me in the chest and she goes: ”You owe me!” And I said: ”I owe you?” And she said: ”Yes, my husband came and saw you in Louisianna in the airport. Do you remember him, the guy with the problem, the phobia of people coughing?” And I said: ”Yeah?” And she said: ”Well, he's so happy it makes me sick! And you are either gonna do the same thing to me or I'm going to be really pissed off at you all week long.” And I said: ” What did I do? What did I do?” I couldn‘t even remember. And she said: ”You made it so everytime I talk to him, everytime he looks at me he is more in love. And I want the same thing. I wanna feel as good as this guy feels. He is in seventh heaven every day all the time.....”So we had to correct that subtle imbalance but I took that as a request that was worthwhile. Coz‘ I think people give up on their relationships too easy. Because they set up a cycle where things keep getting worse. And I‘m making things so that they can continue to get better and things don't stay at a level. Humans are very unstatic and just like feelings are very unstatic. That's why in order to maintain fear it has to have a place where it moves and that's what makes it so easy to change. If you turn it upside down it spins in the opposite direction. A lot of the thrust of my work has been to remove fear and then to make people to be more determined, to not accept feeling bad.I think people feel bad and when it reduces that's an acceptable thing to them. But they don't realize if you're looking for where it's feeling bad it will always endup feeling worse - that you can get rid of this phobia, you just put another one in its place. But until you really start aiming towards pleasure and make yourself so that it is something you are constantly doing that it's an activity that it's not something that is a result.People work their whole lives so that they can retire. They work their whole lives and then they die the minute they retire because they don't know how to enjoy themselves anyway. People have to learn to enjoy just about anything and once they do that they can move on and learn anything.People told me once when I worked with an assembly line. They had one part of the assembly line that just jammed up and they had three times as many people as they thought they needed. All it was was putting in one pin. They put in the pin and hit it with this thing and flattended the pin out on the other side. It just could not have been more boring. They kept having to add more and more sections to this because it kept slowing down. Literally the amount they would go through per hour would reduce. They would put twice as many human beings on and they would end up getting half as much output. And they said they just thought it was too boring and they just didn’t know what to do. And I went in and I sat there and I looked at it and I said: ”I have an idea.” So I took half the people off just to start with. And then I went in and I made it so they all did it together instead of doing it separately. And they all pushed this handle together and I taught them a song that I literally recorded on a boombox and it went krrrrbababababoooom ... And I had em sing this song and do this thing. And what happened was really funny. They started doing this and then I didn’t bring the boombox. They just did it on their own, they started speeding up the tempo and the output was phenomenal. They actually ended up changing it from what I had to the point where they actually putched twice as often as I had it in the tune. And they were going tschtatatattschoohtaoohta and they were outputting stuff faster. But what happened oddly enough is it spread to either side of a line and started speeding up, even though they weren’t doing the same activity. And then it spread through all this thing. And I came back a year later. The seven people that I had working there weren’t there anymore. They were all in management positions in the same company. But yet, they were still singing the same song in the same place. And the output of the entire assembly line went up two and a half times as a direct result. People were just flabbergasted. They said we don‘t know what you did. We know you had them sing a song. But we don’t know what else you did. And I said: ”Well, all I did was make it feel good to push that lever Because everytime I had them push that lever I fired an anchor off that made them all feel good. And what made it so they wanted to do it more ... once they started feeling good about going to work ... just the idea of driving there. They had put the song in their head they would feel good about getting there, right? And they didn’t make it so they never wanted to improve themselves. It just made it so they enjoyed the place where they worked. So they started caring about the company more. They started caring about all aspects of it more. So it doesn’t surprize me they ended up in management positions. Because they wanted everybody to feel as good about the company as they did. They’ve gotten carried away, now they have profit sharing plans. And the company is doing probably ten to fifteen times the busines they were doing five, six, seven, eight years ago.I mean to me, one little change produces massive results. And it’s a simple idea.. If you take something and it's rolling down a hill if you bump it over one little tiny centimeter, like this, the angle. By the time it gets to the bottom of the hill it will be way the hell over here. And so it takes just a small amount but you have to make sure you aim it in the direction you wanna go in. This is the problem that people go in and start randomly doing things. That's why they're always talking about ecology. You never hear me talking about ecology coz‘ that's not a problem I have. Because when I make changes I make sure that they are methodical that they are directed and that they're something that is everybody going to make feel better.I don’t do this: I don’t make it so people can stand up for themselves and torture other people, the kind of thing you were talking about. You don’t need to make anybody feel bad in order for you to feel good. I’ve had people who said: ”You know, I’ve been in assertiveness-training for seven years and I still can‘t stand up and tell a waitress she is taking too long and yell and scream at her.” And I always say: ”Well, you should be grateful. Otherwise you get one of those oysters on your salad right out of the nostril. Being mean to others should not ever be the foundation of people feeling good.”The foundation of feeling good should be just that you know how it is done. And if you get up in the morning and make yourself feel good and make it feel like the world is filled with possibility and lots of choices and head yourself in that direction by the end of the day you’ll feel a thousand times better. But if you get up in the morning and you go: ”Oooh shit, what’s gonna go wrong today?” It will probably be within moments that you’ll be in there in the toilet and you won’t be able to shit. It will go from there and even worse.April 8thRonnie: The raiders of the lost interview are here again. This morning was like mental archeology. About fortyfife minutes of the interview we took yesterday is recorded and we shared stories and wrote down stuff trying to reconstruct what you have said yesterday. But there were some interesting lines running in my mind and there was also some amnesia running around those lines.Richard: Mmmh, there was some amnesia? I remember the amnesia but not what it was about.Ronnie: Yes, and somehow we shared the amnesia.Richard: Oh shared amnesia that’s always good.That is why we tape these things.Ronnie: That’s good. But there is only feedback and no failure - as long as you get a second chance.Richard: Well, it's my firm belief in life that with most things you always get a second chance.Ronnie: This makes life after death a plausible solution.Richard: Well, my tombstone is gonna say: To Be Continued, that's for sure.Ronnie: One thing that I remember about the lost interview yesterday was: you gave us an example of working with someone. You said that you worked with the person then you smiled and then you said: ”Of course this is nonsense!” That was your answer to the person's problem. I don't remember the exact story. But that's kind of an attitude that I like. So to me, I sometimes think of NLP as the ultimate homeopathy: it's like treating nonsense with nonsense - but maybe that is taking it a bit too far.Richard: Well, to me most of the time that's what I feel is that I am treating nonsense with nonsense!One example is: So many times people ask me: what do you think of subliminal tapes? And I did an experiment because I am a firm person in believing in everything. And if you believe in everything and we made subliminal tapes that had a hundred thousand suggestions to be stressed out beyond comprehension, that everything would make you nervous, that everything in the world was collapsing, everything was going wrong, everything in the world would upset you. And then we took them to a place called the Center For Stress. Because it seemed appropriate somehow. And we covered over these suggestions with the sound of the ocean and I handed them to the people in this course and I said : ”We are running an experiment and I want you to listen to these in your car, at home, just constantly for the next month and come back.” And categorically a hundred percent of the people - there were 27 people in the group – every single one of them walked in and – coz I told them they had to give the tape back and it could not be duplicated – and everyone of them came in and said they weren't giving the tape back, that they had had the best month in their entire live. Now what this really means is when I handed them the tape I told them it was a relaxation tape. Now which means - one lie is more powerful than a hundred thousand suggestions that you can absolutely not hear. Which means if you can't hear it it don't fuck with you. Now, I've seen subliminal tapes taken to the nth degree. I actually saw they had a subliminal tape for birthcontrol with a money back guarantee. Now, I don't know about you guys, but if I got pregnant I wouldn't be thinking about getting back my fourteen dollars and ninety five cents but I would be rather angry. I even think that anybody who tries to use a tape for birthcontrol needs more than a birthcontrol tape. I think what we are talking about is a learning disability! But yet this is the kind of stuff that I hear all the timeI am not exactly sure which case you were talking about treating nonsense with nonsense, because they all seem like that to me.They always seem like when people come in and say ”I am depressed” and I say: ”Every moment of your life you are depressed or just at this moment right now?” And they go: ”Well, right now” and I start tickling them right out of the gate. And they start to laugh and then I anchor it. And then with everything they say I fire the anchor and they'll laugh and I say: ”You seem like a pretty chewy guy!” Then I know what’s going to happen. They say: ”Now, I am having fun. But when I look back on it I wont have really been having fun.” So I go: ”Ooh, so you can take anything you want and distort it into something that is depressing?”And when I discovered that it wasn't that depressives didn't enjoy themselves, it was that they remembered everything in a depressive way. It seems to me that that is truly nonsense to take all the fun things in life and squash them into a picture of depression.To me when I told you about the guy who was an operasinger, this is a guy who comes in with absolute total certainty and tells me about his lack of confidence. I mean, this is always what I hear with people when I have somebody who comes in and tells me that they are always like a rug, everybody walks on them, they can't say no to anyone. Then I went: ”Really?” Coz‘ the minute I hear this I hear the solution: I say really: ”Well tell me no! And then they said no they can't do that. Then I said: ”You just did!” and then they go: ”Oooh!” ”What did you think would happen if you said no to people?” and they said: ”Well, I don't know (pronounced no).” ”See, you said it again! Right, now you are telling me you know you can't say no and you already said it in a sentence!” ”Well, not that kind of no!” and I said: ”Well, that's the kind you really need.You need the kind of knowing that you can say yes or no because you know: one takes you one way one takes you the other but if you say you can't say no then to me I think I've got you right there.” I mean, to me, now tell me this is not nonsense! Because I know that people who tell me they can't say no are saying: ”No no no I can't say no!” And that's what I hear them saying, they are saying: ”No no no no, I never say no and noone is gonna make me.” To me I say my clients walk in with the solutions and if you really listen to them they are there.Now I've heard tragic stories, but to me it again boils down to what the Dalai Lama said. The tragedy is not that usually terrible things happen to people – they do. Imagine now half a million people without their homes and their belongings and their fotografs and their papers stuck in box cars and terrified. Are these people gonna have to relive this every day for the rest of their lives because they go to a psychologist? That's even worse to me than what's done to them in one day or over night. If they do to get back to their homes they should get to go back to their whole lives. And I've worked with holocaust victims and it's absolutely incredible stories they tell. It wrenches my heart because I know my relatives died there. But there is no reason on this earth that those people have to relive this over and over again. If you are raped then once is enough. And I don't believe you have to go through the tragedy of reliving trauma in order to get on with their lives. In fact it is the reliving of them that keeps their lives from going forward. It strikes me as totally insane that people have come to me and told me they have been trough these nightmares every night they've relived these tragedies. And I've said: ”How long have you been in therapy?” Some of these people had been in therapy for twentyfive, thirty, forty years, that's a lot of damned therapy. And when I asked them what did they have you do? They take them back into horrible situations, they have them relive it. And it doesn't do them a damned bit of good and they do it over again. To me, this is another form of torture.To me, I've done some of the most idiotic things: When they brought me that poor young man, he was working on a car on a pickuptruck and the jack slipped. He broke his back and the doctors looked at him and what did they say to him?: ”You're never gonna walk again. You might as well get used to it.”This means they are not only doctors they are now clairvoyants. What do you mean he'll never walk again. There is more than one way to walk. Good god, there are people who have their legs chopped off and they walk again! They make them prosthetics. And they say to me: ”Well, those people haven't had any damage to their spine.” And I say: ”Scuse me, if you have your legs chopped off I think there is a bit of a problem!”My son worked for years making prosthetics for people and the major problem was: there is only two important parts of doing it. One is to realize how unpleasant it is to have a pebble in your shoe. So they have to be perfect in order to feel like a part of you. And the other one is that they need to look like a part of you. Coz‘ they make them out of white fucking plastic and I have never seen anybody quite that white and I've met some really white people. I met albinos. I played in band with one for years. What he did when he had black children, he made them black legs. And the guy that he worked for had been making prosthetics for sixty years. Coz‘ he got this job walking down the street waiting for a bus and this old man looked at him and he said: ”What are you doing out in the middle of the day. Don’t you have a job?” And he said: ”I am looking for one. My dad told me: don’t get a job until you find the right one.” So the old guy asked my son: ”How do you feel like making arms and legs?” And my son looked at him and said: that sounds like a cool thing to do.” And he always liked to do things that are artistic.To me everybody is looking for solutions to come in align with somebody‘s theory about what's right and what's wrong and how it should be. We tried insight therapies for years and they just don't work. It's a nice idea that if you understand your problem it would go away. However I understand a lot of the problems of the whole world and they don't go away. You can understand your financial problems and that doesn't help them a bit does it? You still have to go out and make more money. That seems to be the only solution around.To me, it's a funny thing that people tell me they lack motivation and whenever they say it to me they say: ”I just can't get motivated.” And I look at them and I go: ”You are motivated to tell me this?” This is immediately what crosses my mind. I go: Aha, it's not that they lack motivation because they have it, you know. If they lacked motivation they wouldn't get out of bed, they wouldn't be sitting in front of me, they would just stop breathing. That's what somebody who lacks motivation does: they take their breath in and they just hold it. It's too much trouble to let the damned thing out and that would be it. They die. But I tell you they never lack motivation to go to the bathroom. That's a funny thing. I sit there and start to throw out hypnotic suggestions just to be sure. They'll be sitting there and I start saying: ”Well, maybe you are not fluid enough in your approach. You know, sometimes if the pressure is put on in just the right way ....” and the next thing you'll know is you watch them and their teeth will start floating. And the next thing that happens is that they‘ll go: ”Can I use your restroom?” And I go: ”Naaa, don't bother.” And they'll go: ”No really, have to go!” ”I thought you were not motivated?” and they go: ”This is biological” and I go: ”So is happiness! Happiness is as biological as it gets and if you are not motivated to go out and do things that make you more successful just keep the piss inside you! That’s that.” And they say to me: ”That's nonsense!” and you know what? I am proud of it!I yield out some of the best nonsense around!The guy I told you about that the truck fell on, here is a kid and the doctors tell him: Oh, we're not just doctors, we're clairvoyants, we know you'll never walk because you have a spinal injury. So I walk up to him. He's sitting in a wheelchair and I said on stage: ”I really want to tell all you doctors who brought this kid in”, all they wanted to do is to see if he could lift himself up and wipe his own ass because they were tired of this. That other quadraplegics ... I love that word ”quadraplegic”, makes you sound like some kind of prehistoric turtle - he wasn't a quadraplegic, he was a man, and men are entitled to have pride and dignity.This is one of the worst things about what they are doing to the people over in Kosovo. They are robbing them not just of everything but of their dignity. Coz‘ once you take people's dignity it's a hard thing to return.

This is what heroinaddicts loose. You can always get them to stop taking heroin but to get them to reestablish because after they violated their own beliefsystems. And stolen from people that they know they shouldn't and done things, and been able to justify it because they are a drug addict. After that you can justify anything. They break their moral structure and that's the thing that never gets repaired in these programmes. They make it sound like it is cool to be a junkie they put them with other junkies and they can stop taking the drugs but they‘re still a junkie they are a junkie for what they are doing. They put them in places, like in the U.S. they used to have Simenon (?) They’ve got such a cult. They ended up putting snakes in people's mailboxes and thinking that was o.k. Well, they could think anything was o.k because as long as they were in a pack like dogs they can do just about anything. But I don't believe that cults should have more than one member. Now, I know that sounds like nonsense again. But it is the solution.
If everybody makes up their own moral structure and abides by it we'd be a lot better off. Because people wouldn't be able to steal. Because if they said stealing was o.k. then everyone would be allowed to steal from them.That's what the sign would say. O.K., your a thief, open the house! Everytime he's gone everybody in the world is allowed to steal from this person. Sounds like nonsense but it would work. If you were caught stealing that meant they would put on your house a big sign and everybody was welcome to steal your belongings. These people would learn what it feels like to be violated. Because when somebody's house is robbed one of the worst things that mattered is not the objects that are gone but the sense of violation that people have that they loose their dignity, that somehow their own space and world gets violated in that way.
These people that were on the stage were violating that young man's dignity and this pissed me off. I said: ”To whether he'll walk again or not, this I don't know. But I would like to tell you all that I think you are a bunch of fucking assholes!” And here's a thousand people in the audience they all gasped. He was a very famous surgeon who couldn't help this young man and he was just trying to do this for this boys own good. How dare I call him an asshole. But do you know who clapped? The man in the wheelchair who wasn't even on the stage. They had him out in the wings to see, you know. Could I take Feldenkraiswork and help the poor crippled?
I walked over to the young man and I kicked him in the foot. Now this is absolutely nonsense to do this. And he looked at me and asked: ”Why did you do that?” ”Coz‘ I have a question. Did you feel that?” And he said yes. So I kicked him again in the other foot and I said: ”Could you feel that?” and he said: ”Yeah!” ”Do you know where the floor is?” He said yeah. And I said: ”Now, do you know the difference between the inside and the outside of your foot?” and I walked over and looked at him. ”Are you gonna kick me again?” ”Only if I have to.” If I have to kick somebody I have no problem with that. I mean I've done silly things to clients.To them as far as they were concerned their life was on the edge of things but it was just to show to them that it wasn't.
I had one guy who said that no way in the world he ever wanted anyone to touch him and he said this was aproblem coz‘ he was married and he had this whole thing about being a compulsive.To begin with he couldn't even go to a bathroom in a public place. He was in New York so of course I told him I could only see him in Houston and he literally went to the bathroom and got on an airplane, brought his own food, flew with four or five other people all the way to Houston, came into the hotel and I showed up three hours late. I was already there but when I walked in he said: ”I don't want anyone to touch me” and I said: ”Let me show you something” and I went and opened up the windows of the doors, coz‘ I picked the room particularly for him, opened up the french doors, grabbed him like this and walked up and held him out over the balcony and asked: ”Now, do you want me to let go?” And he was grabbing on to me like something you've never seen in your life and I said: ”Don't touch me!” and he went: ”Aaah!” when I left him over the balcony. He pulled his arms around me and just held on. I said: ”Good, now that that problem is out of the way what else do you want?” In my room it had a little sign that said if you‘re missing anything: ask the bellman. He said he washed his hands constantly but couldn't brush his teeth. I said: ”I tell you what I wanna do. I send you on a journey. I want you to go downstairs and I want you to ask the bellman where you can go and get a toothbrush, some toothpaste, some toiletpaper and things coz‘ you're gonna need them.” And he went downstairs and he walked up and asked the bellman and the bellman reached underneath, handed him toothbrush and toothpaste, and he was shocked. He didn't even know this person but since he hadn't been out much he didn't know this kind of thing happened. And he said when he came upstairs: ”The gentleman downstairs just gave me these things.” And I said: “What did you do?” ”I shook his hand and said thank you.” ”Really?” ”And he was even black!” ”Was it any different than shaking my hand?” And he went: ”No?!” ”Now, think how many hands are out there you haven't shaken?”
See, it's just like this kid. When there was somebody in the audience, and I had noticed this right off, that had the same kind clutches, the kind that has that thing that goes around your wrist and it has a handle and I've seen lots of people walk with these things.
Fortunately I was misinformed coz‘ I hadn't really asked. But apparently if you you have spinal injury of this nature you cannot walk with these. Apparently they're not good enough. In other words that's not supposed to help you because you're never supposed to be able to walk. Apparently this is what the doctor said. However I figured if you knew where the inside of your foot was versus the outside, as long as your legs didn't slip out then if they're sticking down that I've seen people swing their legs forward together or walk with them individually and all kinds of weirdassed things. I didn't realize that they can do that but that they have to have some other problem than a spinal injury. Apparently some of them didn't know either because some of the people I know who walk are with those injuries. They were just misinformed and were walking when they shouldn't be. But apparently they didn't have enough medical training to know what their problems were and what their limitations should be. I explained this to this young kid and I explained it to the audience. And I asked the guy if I could borrow his crutches. He threw them up on the stage and I took them and walked over and I said: ”Now, these are a little short for you. But let's give em a try” and I gave it to him. And I said: ”Now, I don't know what it's gonna take to get you up but if I have to kick you in the ass I'll do that, too.” And he just smiled and put them on and went like this and he lifted himself up and he walked over. And I said: ”I thought you couldn't walk and he said: ”Me, too!” And I said: ”Well, it turns out we were wrong.” And I turned around and I looked at the doctor and the doctor turned beadred and started yelling at me in front of a thousand people. He said: ”You think you're such a smart ass!” And I said: ”No, I don't. I think my ass is as stupid as anybody else's. The only difference is I know it.” And this is the nonsense: to be able to decide what other human beings are incapable of is got to be one of the stupidest things anybody can do. And that's true for me and that' true for anybody. If a client came in and I was trying to figure out what was impossible for them I mean this is absolutely crazy.
I had one kid who came in who was told quite frankly that he would never be able to learn to read and write that he had some mysterious thing I've never even heard of it. They said he was crosshemisphered. We're all crosshemisphered, aren't we? But apparently this is some new learning- disability-diagnosis. Another piece of mumbojumbo which doesn't tell you anything about what to do about it, except not try! They wanted me to hypnotize him and make it so that he would accept since he couldn‘t read that he would have to use these books which were read on to tape and stuff. And he seemed to be an absolutely uncooperative young man because he would not accept his limitation. He kept continually trying to read and he wasn't a young boy. He had been in the military and get this: he worked at a whirlpool. He could put an engine together and put it back together! Blindfolded! And I said: ”Jesus Christ, I can't even find my carkeys half the time, let alone do that. I gotta to find out what's going on here. This does not make any sense to me.” So I kicked his ass into the deepest trance I could and I told his unconscious I wanted him to just bring back into his mind what it is that brought this into being but not his conscious mind coz‘ he didn't need to know about it. He needed to know that it wasn't true that whatever was stopping him. And suddenly he sat up and looked me straight in the eyes in a deep trance like this and he went and he said: ”Teacher told him.” and I asked when and he said: ”Five years old - teacher told him never learn - crack pencil in front of his face!”
He referred to himself in the second person closed his eyes and fell over backwards. I brought him out of trance and asked: ”What happened?” And he said: ”What do you mean what happened, we haven't started yet.” And I went: Mmmh, little amnesia there! So I walked around the room picked up a pencil and walked over to him and said: ”It's time to start learning and snapped the pencil in front of his face.” Now tell me this is not nonsense! And suddenly he looked at me and you could see the facial changes in front of his face. And everything in his neurology went whacky and suddenly he looked at me and he went: ”I feel different!” And I said: ”Do you? and I handed him a book and he picked it up and he could read. He already knew how to read. He was just operating out of a posthypnotic suggestion from one of those really inherently helpful people who got frustrated when he was a young kid and he carried this posthypnotic suggestion a little too far. I think this is true in most cases. I find this is part of the nonsense that goes on. It's not that humans can't learn, it's that they learn too much too quickly. And I find this to be nonsense. I find now that I've heard so much of it that when people start telling me they start hearing how much nonsense it is, too. Because I don't go: Oooh, how terrible! I usually look at them like: Excuse me?? And then I ask those funny questions because to me, I understand the metamodel and I understand that most people teach it a little differently than I do. To me for instance I find ”when”-questions to be the most important that when people tell me: ”I'm depressed” I go: ”When?” Coz I don't really wanna know about what and I don't wanna know how they depress themselves. Because I don't really wanna depress anybody else. That's not what I'm after. It's just when I talked to you yesterday about schizophrenia: To me that's too big a word. We need smaller words that tell us about each kind of thing. There are many forms of people not being in touch with reality and this is where I go to the greatest extreme to create nonsense. I mean sometimes it's like the woman I told you about yesterday who the psychiatrist was the one who had the answer. Coz‘ the schizophrenic was schizophrenic because she didn't know. I mean if you can't tell the difference between remembered images and fantasies and you don't know which ones really happened. And it seemed to me pretty apparent because all she kept doing was asking people: ”Did I do this?” and they said no. But it didn't convince her. Because she still didn't have a way to know which ones were which. When she thought about a memory and she thought about something she created in her mind. But now they're both memories and they both look the same. So by having her put black border all around the ones that are created. Now this is the way the psychiatrist did it, because when I asked him how he was able to tell the difference between what was real and what was not real this was his answer. And it seemed like a good answer. It's not the way I do it. But it's the way he did it. And it was good enough for him and it worked for her. To me this is always the problem: they are always studying the wrong thing to find out.
To me when you asked me yesterday what's the kind of things I am looking at nowadays I decided that if I started out doing things the first thing that I really concentrate on is getting rid of people's fears. Because with fears, you're only born with two of them. You have the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling. Everything else is learned. Children will crawl into a fire – once. And they'll either die or they'll learn. And unfortunately or fortunately - as the case may be - nowadays we learn to be afraid because someone tells us to. Because someone scares us before we do things.
If the child crawls towards the fire the mother screams: ”Aaah, don't do that!” so the kid doesn't get burned. But it learns to be afraid of anything because they simply scare the kid and associate those things together. And kids are so good at learning it they become afraid of everything. It's phenomenal they become afraid of speaking their mind. They confuse words with things so much they think that words are gonna kill. And it's not words that kill - it's tonality that does it. If you have any doubt about that I can introduce you to a few people. There is some people their tonality is so horrible, and what is really horrible is the effect it has on the people who learn from them. And people learn from their teachers, they learn from their parents, they learn from relatives all these people who love them who don't want them to be hurt. Because people don't do the simple thing that we do.
Like I had to take my computer in and had my harddisk cleaned off because it was a mess. It got to the point where I had dumped so much in there that my computer couldn't even tell that he had a CD-ROM Player in the machine. It wasn’t external, it was internal. And I turned it on and it would show which things were there and it wouldn‘t recognize anything on the outside and it didn’t even know half of what it had on the inside. You would pull up programmes and it wouldn’t even have the words that were there. They were translated into total gibberish, symbols and stuff. Everything had leaked on to everything. I had so many errors on the thing it was beyond repair. So you wipe the harddisk clean and you reload the initial software and you save the things that you want onto a disk and then you put them back on carefully so that they're ordered.
Well, humans don't do much of that kind of thing. They don't go through and update their learnings. They don't so to speak pull out the memories taht are good that they wanna keep and get rid of the garbage. And part of the reason is we are not so much a read/write system. We are an archival system, that is: all the memory that is there always will be there! You can always hypnotize people no matter what happened and have them relive traumas and they'll be just as bad as they were. And it doesn't matter how much therapy they've had . The anger never goes away, the fear never goes away. Humans are capable of an infinite amount of everything. But what they seem to practice is feeling bad. And to me the trick is to teach them how to spend more time every day feeling good about good things. Not feeling good because they are better than other people, not feeling good for any other reason other than they are capable of it neurologically! Coz‘ the more you feel good the more your unconscious moves in that direction. Unconsciously you don't have a criterion that says things are good or bad. Coz‘ feelings are just feelings. They are just chemistry. You are a big chemistry set. And what we have to learn is to deal with things.
I said in the structure of magic which was my thesis that I was gonna do three things. I was planning to do them all in the book but it's taken me thirty years to really get down to most of them because I'm kind of a rigorous detailed little thing. A lot of people look at me as being quite flaky but in my own way I always get where I'm going. But I always like to run through all the avenues on the way. I'm not the kind of person who goes in and goes directly anywhere. To me, I go through but I wanna make sure that while I'm going where I think things should be, that if along the ways I don't, I find out. Because a lot of times what happens is: when people find out they‘re going the wrong way they don't stop going that way. They don't think they are wrong, they
don't think it's possible for them to be wrong. So they keep going that way either louder, faster, harder or whatever. And if you turn the lights off in a room and you run to get out of it you'll hit a wall. Now if what you do is you back up and you run faster eventually you'll knock yourself out. If on the other hand you start to feel your way around you'll find that magic thing called a door.
Years ago when I was interviewed and John was interviewed and we were not even interviewed together. And one of the first things they did is they misquoted John and said that I've said it. John said if there was someone who could walk through a wall we could model it and make it so that other people could do it. And I know what John meant when he said that. When the article came out it said with bold letters: ”Richard Bandler claims: NLP can teach you to walk through walls” And the truth is: it can! Because if you can't tell the damned difference between a fucking door and a wall you're in big trouble! You go through the place where the hole is. I had people who came into seminars making an idiot of themselves - as we say nonsense. The nonsense was they go: ”Well, can you make it so that I can walk through a wall?” and I said: ”Sure!” and I bring them right up and I put my hand on the back of their head and I have them visualize a hole opening up and then I take them and slam them against the wall. And I'd say: ”You made the hole the wrong color!” I get some of them to do it four or five times. Actually after the first time their head hit the wall it was quite easy and then eventually I take them over and I'd open the door and just throw them through, close it and put a broomhandle on the backside.
That to me is a funny thing: That people put so much effort into defending theories. And I never put any energy into it. And that's why I've gone as far and as fast as I have. All I was looking for was a way to get to the end. And if anybody knew any way to get to the end, I didn't care what they call it. Whether they called it psychotherapy, whether they called it religion, whether they called it psychic healing, I don't care what the name of it is. All I wanna know is how to get to the end. And I'll cut the rest out of the way really quickly. I am very good at getting rid of the nonsense and sticking with the really pure nonsense.
Now, to me, I think it's amazing that people can believe certain things and really get powerful healing from it. The fact that they can hand people pills that look alike and one is full of the drug and the other has nothing in it. And the ones without any in it work eight out of ten times as good as these. I think that's a real comment on the ones that just look like it. I wanted to put out a product actually called ”Placebo Plus” and I was very serious about it at the time. We were gonna buy a pharmaceutical company and put out drugs so that you got whatever your painkiller was. It never works that way with antibiotics, by the way. But with a lot of things like if you had a headache eight out of ten times a placebo works as well as aspirin. And so we thought, ghee whizz, take eleven. We were first going to put out a product where just some of them were placebos but then I thought why bother? Let's just give people empty gelaton capsules and we'll color them. So that the red ones are for headaches, the blue ones are for this and we gave them a little booklet. So you went through the booklet and you looked up ”headaches” and it gave you fifteen different pieces of research and it said: Eight out of ten this worked as well as the real thing, so take twelve just to be safe! And at the beginning it told you how to change a belief.
Because I think that probably one of the most important things that I've ever done was to find out how people changed a belief, so that it was so strong that it effected their chemistry and their neurology. It's nothing but the swish pattern but nonthoroughly.
To me the difference between the way I teach people to do things and the way they get distorted over the years is that people take old books, old tapes, distorted learnings. Because if you take thirty people in a room and you say a sentence to one and you pass it around by the time it gets to the end it doesn’t even match the first sentence. Usually it doesn‘t get through five people. They do this with children as a game but you can do it with adults to prove a point. But yet they think they can take whole years of experience of somebody like me and not even take somebody that I taught. Take somebody who attended a one or two day course and annointed themselves a trainer and went to somebody who went to somebody who went to somebody who didn’t go to anybody - and that they’re still gonna know the same things. No!
And it's a shame that they can get away with even using the same words but this isn’t nonsense this is criminal activity as far as I am concerned. And it’s criminal in the sense that the enduser gets defrauded that when people are trained and taught the meta model so that somebody goes ”I'm depressed” and they learn to say ”about what?” Who cares? There's a real relevancy challenge for me in everything. And you always start building the biggest piece and moving to the smallest piece. In the metamodel the biggest pieces are the ones that are challenges about consciousness. In fact the metamodel is really designed as a very precise tool.You see, when you ask questions you should already know what the answers are gonna be because you should know what the next question you're gonna ask is. Because they go in loops of threes. Start on the inside of the model and you work towards the edge of it or you start on the outside and you work towards the edge of it. When you ask a question that has to do with challenging lost performative, so when somebody comes in and says: ”People aren't meant to be happy” and to me, I don't go: ”Happy about what?” I don't care! I hear that somebody is making a statement that's not just about themselves and about their own mind. They're making a thing that says: I am saying this is the case. Only they forget that part. And it sems to me eminently important and we go: ”Aaah, is this written on the earth or does this come on the embryo?” To me this is a particular kind of a challenge. I am not challenging the case that they are saying it's always the case, coz‘ you could challenge the universal quantifier. Coz‘ to me, they all go two ways and you have to go this way and you have to go that way. You have to take people so that they go from the inside of their world so that they go right up against their model of the world. And then you have to take them on the outside and push them so that they end up face to face with themselves, so that they realize that they are a person who can conceive of things outside of their own mind, so therefore they must be able to do them. And on the same token they need to be slammed up against their model of the world so that their nose is bent against the glass and they're looking out, so that they know: hey, this is your edge, you can move it over. You don't have to destroy it, you don't even have to jump into any great abyss. All you have to do is open the particular door that you want.
And I find all too often people have agendas that they want everybody to believe the same thing. I am not like that. I don't want my clients to be like me
I'm not even sure I want them to like me. Most of the time I just want them to fear me: that it is more unpleasant to come back than it is to face anything in their own life. Because once they know that something's silly, something very very silly, that when they walk in and tell me: I'm so confident that I haven’t got any confidence. I‘ve had people tell me that they were just wrecked with insecurity. So I go: ”Are you sure about that?” So that they are certain about their uncertainty. It's always the thing where they have such a high opinion of their opinion of their lack of judgement. So that anybody who comes in and says: ”Well I don't have good judgement” then I go: ”Well, you're probably wrong about that.” As soon as I say that they begin to understand that language is only a way of talking about things. It's not the things itself and language has inherent flaws in it, right? The fact is that when they go into situations they still feel scared and what they need to do is to start at the very beginning and understand the chemistry set.
Because to me, I know much more about the motor cortex and how it works and much more about the chemistry set than the people who have even known the names of all the chemicals. It's not that you know the name of every hormone in the body, you know that serotonin does this and does that. I‘m just finicky. I like to know all that stuff but I never tell my clients about it. That's not important for them to know about it. I might tell the the people I train about it. Coz‘ I want them to be educated enough to go out and look and understand this is all we know about it now. These wonderful scientist are out there digging everything up for us every day and spewing it now into the internet and into magazines.
I think the most important thing for people to become is literate. The more you read the more you find. Sometimes you can read the same book over and over again and every time you read it you can learn something new. I've even read some of my own books every once in a while and went: ”How come I didn't know that?” Somewhere in the back of my mind it came spewing out but boy I’d be darned if I have any memory of it.
I remember Paul McKenna one time asking me when we were doing a training: I really want you to do that thing I saw you do when we were at Breezy Point, about the immune system. And I remember looking at him and going: ”What was it?” And as he described it to me its sounded totally new. And he was convinced I taught it to him, but I don’t know where it came from nor do I care. I just went: ”Boy, that’s clever! Yeah, yeah, you go ahead and teach it and I’ll watch.” Whether he dreamed it, whether I did it doesn’t matter. It still was new to me and I’m gonna take it and use it in any way I can.
To me, when we get down to the chemistry it requires that people generate a chemical change in their body in order to change any state. And we have to start examining where does this begin and do what you do with any archival system. That when I owned an R&D Company we specialized in archival memory. We built holographic memory you know fifteen, twenty years ago. We were storing it 10 to the 12
th
. They can't even do that yet. We had to throw it out the window because it made everything too cheap.They were selling machines for fifty thousand that we were selling for three thousand. And we weren't even manufacturers we were engineers. Anywhere they could store any dot we could store a hundred dots. And all the information is everywhere that's the nice thing about holographic memory. You can jam a pencil through it and all you loose is a little of the
brightness just like if take a hologram and you cut it in half you can still see the whole image. All you loose is part of the brightness. It provided for me an understanding of submodalities a long, long time ago and how they function in human beings. It doesn't matter how many times you attack a memory in a human being the memory is always going to be there. And the fact that Penfield chopped people’s heads open and stuck an electrode in and zapped them and they thought of a particuliar event means nothing! That kind of logic would mean that if you opened up the back of your TV and you cut a wire and the picture disappeared that that would be what makes the picture appear. I mean that’s just goofy logic. And goofy logic does not produce the results that you need like sequential examination does, that human beings have to know when to start things and it all goes by too fast.They will always say to you the following thing: ”It‘s just that I feel ...” and then you go off the back and in front of it.
When you use archival memory systems and you wanna change somebodys address since it is archival you can't erase anything. So what you have to do is put something in front of it the new address, so they always get the new address and then turn away. The old one is still there, you just never get it. It's just that simple. And human beings work the same way. When you want new respones you have to get them in front of the old ones. So that to me it's all about creating a void and filling it.
And there is a special chemical thing that I noticed happened and I noticed this in my own behavior that when I was required to change and I stuck to my guns. The telephone company gave me a new phone number. I didn't move, I didn't do anything. I‘d had the same phone number for years. I was so fussy that when I moved I took my phone number with me coz I liked it. It was one of those easy to remember things. But then they came along and they changed the damned areacodes. And they changed my phonenumber whether I liked it or not. It didn’t matter. I don’t call myself that often. But I would go to the store and I couldn’t remember what I was doing there, so I’d go call my wife. I’d go to the payphone and I would dial that old number. And I‘d get furious coz‘ after a while they wouldn’t even tell you the new number. And one day I pressed that old number I stopped and said: ”I‘m not going to do it this time!” and I started to laugh. And that laughter just like all laughter produces endomorphines, in other words drugs, for lack of a better term. But it’s the kind of drugs you are manufacturing in your body all the time. And as soon as you laugh you never make the same mistake. And as soon as I noticed that I went hmmm! because it is not enough to precisely follow procedures. You have to do it in the right state and this requires two things. One: that you go first, in other words you have to change yourself. If you are afraid of heights and you work with people who you are afraid of heights you're a fucking hypocrite.
Now, there are things I’ve gotten people to do that I don’t wanna do. It‘s just simple: I don‘t wanna jump out of an airplane. I did once but it wasn’t my idea. It was one of those things where the military says: ghee, this looks like fun, do it. And they had started with an airplane that was only a foot off the ground. And it was only a little fake cockpit coz‘ they wanted you to learn how to jump down and roll on the ground with a parachute. And I didn’t want to jump out of that. I didn‘t even want to go in a room with that many guys. It was just not my thing.
But if you take the fact that people are capable of producing such crazy things as homophobia this drives me nuts. Hey, you know what? Use your mind if the guys wanna date each other this just leaves more girls, doesn’t it? I mean, why are people afraid of the fact that some guy wants to look prettier. My wife said that one day: Why are people so upset when all they wanna do is look a little prettier. What is the big deal? So if they wanna wear a dress and a wig and makeup and dance up and down the streets in high heels? Why are people so upset that they are getting baseball bats and beating people unconscious? It’s absolutely ludicrous. They should look at them and go: Hey this number one leaves more girls for me. Pat Robertson in the U.S., one of our great religious leaders, who is so concerned about all the homosexuals and the activities they are engaging in, well my comment to him is: ”Pat, if you don’t make the pictures in your mind they won’t bother you. It’s just that simple.”
I mean I live in San Francisco, these gay guy, man, I got news for you. When they walk up to me they always look at me and they go: ”Ttttt, I’m sorry Richard, you know we’re gonna have to teach you how to dress better.” They‘re always taking little hairs off my shirt, that I can’t even see. But there’s no way in the world they would wrinkle. I don’t know how people walk around without wrinkling. I always go: Jesus, someday I have to learn to not wrinkle. But this kind of fear which gets turned into hate and then turned into anger and then turned into total stupidity. A little nonsense I can deal with but stupidity I dislike. I dislike when people do things that are idiotic.
And it is absolutely idiotic, as far as I am concerned for people to claim that they are involved in a field and not wanna know how things work and not wanna do them with the right attitude. To me the right attitude is the one where you have a sense of humor about things. You learn to look at things and as people tell you sometimes very tragic stories you still have to see the part of it that's nonsense.
I worked with some people that were kidnapped, they were raped, they were beaten, they were left for dead, and what did they want me to do? They wanted me to help them because they had total amnesia. They wanted me to get these people to recover a full memory of what had happened to them. And they looked at these poor scared people in hospitalbeds and in their presence. They said this, not behind closed doors but right smacking in front of them like they were pieces of meat. And I mean this is one of the things that has driven me crazy for years.
In fact years ago they brought a kid to me and he‘d been hurt when he was young. His father had said this right in front of him. He was standing there and his dad says: ”Well, he was such a bright child, we had such great hopes for him until the accident. All we want now for him is to maybe to put his own shoes on and go to the bathroom by himself.” Seems to be a great concern that people have. And I turned around and got furious. I said: ”Excuse me, you haven‘t introduced me to your son, yet.” And he said: ”Oh, he can't really talk.” And I said: ”I beg your pardon???” and they told me he had epileptic seizures and I found out why. In a three-day-weekend we got him not only to be able to put on his shoes and put on his clothes and walk and talk, we got him to have an epileptic seizure on cue and it was real simple. All I had to do was to talk about when people were mistreated in this way. Whenever you refer to human beings as if they were not conscious, and this includes when they are knocked out on anaesthetics, when
they are on the operating table, you gotta watch what you say, very carefully. And the only way to do that is to listen. A lot of people don't listen when they talk. In fact, if you ask them what's the opposite of talking will tell you: listening. Which means when they're talking they're not listening. And those shouldn't be the opposite but a simultaneous activity.
And this should be especially true of people who are experts in any field, especially the one that I made up. It' something were we should just be exploring. I feel like I'm just getting started and there's these people who claim to be authorities. And if I'm not an authority how the hell do they get to be one? That means they should be able to do things I can’t do and I haven't found much of that yet. I haven‘t found much in the books that I didn't do one time or another.
As far as I can tell other than myself and Robert Dilts there hasn't been a lot of creative work where people have done new things. Robert's worked a lot with allergies. But I remember starting that years and years ago. When people told me they had allergies the first thing I would do is go get what they were allergic to. But then I'd get them in a really good mood and I'd anchor it. And then I had them close their eyes and I'd fire off that anchor repeatedly and stick whatever it is in front of their face.
I had a woman who was so allergic to roses, she said that she would begin coughing and hacking and her eyes would water. And she looked at me and she said: ”And it wouldn’t bother me except I know that everytime I’m going anywhere and my husband looks at roses that he feels, bad coz‘ he can’t buy me that kind of flower. And he always feels like it’s not romantic to bring me other flowers”. And she said: ”It would be for me but it’s just something that has built up over the years.” So I said: ”Well, a rose by any other name is still a rose.” Now, what arose in my mind at that time is that what she needed to do is not that you respond to the substance as an allergy. You have to be in the right state to do that. If your normal state of chemistry puts you in a state where certain things give you an allergic response, especially airborne things or things that you eat, that’s very difficult to deal with. Because as you are metabolizing this is a very unconscious thing, especially for people who don’t use their nose.
See my big theory is your nose is over your mouth for a particuliar reason. Because if it was over your butt you would only know what you had eaten that you shouldn’t eat. And it is over your mouth to tell you how to adjust your metabolism so it knows how to digest the food or things to tell you to not put in. I mean it’s not like it‘s on the back of your head, it’s not pointing up. It’s right over your mouth and that seems like a good place for it.
To me people often say: ”Do you believe in god?” And I say: ”Yeah, and in fact I believe in quite a few of them, because I’m willing to believe in anything. And I also believe that the organization of the human beings is a methodically built thing which is pretty useful. To me, it’s nonsense for us not to develop these things any further. We’re at a state evolutionarily where we can go further by making our mind do certain things.
Anyway, what else did you wanna know about? Did I miss anything?
Ronnie: Yesterday you mentioned that a lot of wisdom has been around and it got lost, like Rasputin and other wise people ...
Richard: Especially when it comes to writing. When you think how many books have been written. And that a hundred years ago most books when they got published it was amazing if even a hundred maybe two hundred copies got made. And that was it and off they went. Since I’ve been here in London whenever I have a break between courses and stuff my wife and I get on the trains and go out and find some place in the middle of nowhere. She goes and looks at all the wonderful things that are there and I go into all the musty bookstores I can find and crawl around in the back and find things and then the two of us sit at night and weed through them and find all the good pieces of information. You have to understand that to me - just because they divided fields up doesn’t mean that you should remain ignorant of other things. Everything that people studied about everything, whether it was how to build architecture. There are many things, the study of catastrophe-theory which is how you build bridges and buildings. There are a lot of things like sheetmetal that bend and then they go right back. But there is also a point at which you bend them they never go back. Which is not a good or bad thing. It’s a bad thing if it is a bridge, it’s a good thing if you wanna build things which have shape. Coz‘ it means you can take sheetmetal and put around something that is square and it stays perfectly square. It just requires a certain amount of force and a certain amount of velocity and it will take shape and it will never go back.You have to melt it down into metal to start all over again. There is no way once you reach the point of catastrophe. Now that set of mathematics has nothing to do with anything. But yet I use it because I believe in anything that human beings have thought about has to do with human beings. Period.
Poetry, art, music, everything all of the things and all of the wisdom. They don’t talk about people like Salvador Dali as being someone who is a philosopher. He was somebody who wrote about art. But everything he said about art was about seeing, it was about understanding what you see and it was about how to make representations and to me this is true whenever we‘re talking about the way in which people design things: civil engineers. Most people have not gone and studied civil engineers. I studied it because I think it’s about human beings. The idea about how you hallucinate roads that aren’t there and then go and mark them out so people can build them, I think that’s phenomenal. This is a phenomenal skill to be able to look through and measure something that isn’t there. I still consider it a phenomenal thing. I became fascinated with how they make topographical maps. The idea that they measure something in the sky in such a way that they know the depth of everything. They don’t just go through and take pictures. They know how high everything is, up and down and what the location is. And they do it by lining up certain points from a distance and it is the relationship. So they take the picture from this point and from that point and by the difference between the two they can actually calculate all this marvellous information. We tried once using it to being able to determine the relationship. In other words we actually used the same thing to tell where pictures had been taken from. In other words we reversed the process. We looked at regular photographs and were able to actually compute exactly were the picture was taken from by reversing the process. We went to the places where the pictures were shot. We used these dots they use on to the surface that the picture was taken from. And
once the dots were there we were able to compute were the camera was where the picture was taken, so that we could go back and look at it from that point of view. Coz‘ I wanted to see something that somebody saw when they took a picture. When we went there there was no way we could see it coz‘ you had to have the angle absolutely perfect.
One of the things I learned making holograms - which I think was probably one of the most profound things of all - was that when you make a hologram you get nine of them on a plate. This is a laser hologram. So when we find the main hologram which is the one where the object was ... so if you put a coin back here and you put a glass filmplate here and you exposed it ... you put light on the coin and the light that is dispersing off the coin. You take half the beam and you have it so it collides with that light. That’s called a reference beam. So the light from the object shines into the reference beam and it disperses onto the film, this is called the Fourier pattern. Now, the Fourier pattern isn’t like a picture. Coz‘ a picture when we look at it we all see it. But the Fourier pattern when you go through and you shine the laser there, when you lift it you put the plate right back where it was and you lift the object out, the object is still there. You still see the object. It’s like the coin looks exactly like the coin. You can’t tell it apart. When people stick their finger through it it’s a real hallucination. Now, what is really amazing is you take the same plate off and you tilt that plate you’ll also find eight other holograms on it. There is one at an angle over here and one over here. So if you turn it so that the reference beam is at just the right angle you can see this. There are also some which are supposed to be real images that are virtual images. These are in front of the plate. So that here is the plate, here is the object. People can not see them until you show them where it is. Once they can see it they can never not see it again. It’s a permanent learning. They can always take a holographic plate after that and find the one that is in front. And when they see it they can’t not see it. They’ll turn it and it’s always there. And it’s a funny thing because they can’t see it at all. And all you have to do to teach them is put your finger on the glass plate and tell them to watch. And you move your finger out to where the object is. The minute they focus their eyes in the right place. Coz‘ we as human beings focus our eyes on glassplates and look what’s outside of the window. That’s just the way we are trained to do. We don’t see objects that are inside. We don’t look at the glassplates to see what’s in front of them, right? Since we are so trained to do that. You know what is really odd is when they found some tribes that had not been exposed to civilization at all. They had to teach them how to see through glass. Coz‘ it turns out humans can’t do that. It’s a learned phenomenon. When you look out the window what happens is your eye picks a pinpoint on the glass. You don’t actually see through it but you actually know what must be on the outside because all the light is bouncing off of the buildings and bouncing off of the windows and it creates a Fourier pattern. That‘s how they figured out how to make holograms. Because somebody was sitting there and figured you can’t really see through glass. It’s not really what’s happening. What’s happening is the light is all colliding and creating holograms all over the place and you’re figuring out what must be there. See the interesting thing about the hologram is when you remove the object there is a picture of it there. But the way the light is your brain knows what must have been there at the time the hologram was made. That’s why when you break it in half you can still tell everything that’s there.
If you take a magnifying glass and two chess pieces and make a hologram of it ... when you take all the chess pieces and the magnifying glass away and look at it and see them. When you go this way it will magnify one thing and when you go that way it will magnify another. Because it’s the knowledge that’s created there not representations that are one on one relationships. This is how the mind works. This is why we’re able to do such things as blow certain things out of proportion when people use a phrase or an idiomatic speech.
I thought it was funny that everybody missed accessing cues in the first place. Because when people talk about feelings they go: ”Well, it’s down right impossible” and I mean they come right out and say it, and move their eyes in that direction. It seemed to me that if psychologists were really observant they might have seen that, you know when people go: ”Mhmm, let’s see”. They stop, they say it and they do it. When they literally make gestures like telephones, put their hand up to their ears and go: ”Well I tell myself” and their’re pointing to their ear, touching their ear. I mean, one they go: ”see”, and they look up, one they go: ”feel”, down right and the other they go: ”Well, I tell myself” and touch their ear. If psychologists had really been observant they would have noticed this. The reason I noticed it is that I don’t have a theory. So I don’t have anything to fit anything through. I’m anti-theoretical and it’s because I am only looking for what works. And I don’t need to know why. In fact to me causal relationships I know are deceptive.
Everything that we know in science in a hundred or two hundred years will be totally wrong. It will be antiquated. All the theories, the laws of thermodynamics are disproved now. I disproved one of them myself. I mean I went to a physics convention and did all the mathematics to prove to them that the law of entropy is simply not the case. That’s the second law of thermodynamic which says that everything will become more random and falling apart. And this just simply is not the case. All the toasters are appearing right here on this planet. And what that means is the elements that it takes to put together an object and make it a toaster require one of the forces that they do not take into account in their equations: consciousness! It won’t be long before some visual goes out there and takes the asteroid belt and organizes them by size. It won’t be long before people are redoing these things. We have great things ahead of us for human beings. And the little things we are worrying about now ... about what religion somebody believes in, what the name of the country is, if they are ethnic Albanians as opposed to what other kind of Albanians. But how they tell them apart is beyond me. And why they bother to is even more beyond me. To create chaos when people are trying to make everything fit what they understand ... that there has to be good guys and bad guys, and right and wrong. And the right and wrong isn’t based on what works, it’s based on what’s convenient. It’s transient.
See, on the other hand everything that’s in fiction will still be the same in hundred years, so therefor all the things in science fiction and all the things in fiction will remain constant and all the science is transitory. And this is why I know that even though the times seem dark and people seem like they have trouble I always have to tell them that there is delight at the end of the tunnel.
Ronnie: So you are optimistic that we are heading for an evolution.
Richard: Well, evolution can‘t be over, that’s for sure.